Elegant characterization of operads

I spent a few days last week playing host to the marvellous Jeff Egger, returning the favour from last summer, drinking lots of beer and talking about mathematics. One of the nice things I learned was this rather elegant characterisation of operads: I'd seen it before, but never really grokked it.

[Warning: if you don't at least know what power series and symmetric groups are, you'll have some trouble following this]

( Here Be Dragons )

Because this journal's readership has such a variety of intellectual backgrounds, I'm going to try the following experiment: I'm going to tag posts with beware the geek when I'm just talking to the experts (be they mathematical or computational) - so if you're not an expert, and you can't understand such a post, don't worry about it. If you can't understand a post and it doesn't have such a tag, however, I'd like to know about it, because I was trying to talk to you - either the maths/CS isn't essential to an understanding of the real point, or I was trying to explain it and failing.

Calling all Queen fans

weaselspoon wishes to know the following:

I have a memory of an interview with Brian May where he talked about learning to play on his father's banjo ukulele and I believe he said that he played it on some Queen track. Is this true? Did I dream it? Where is the ukulele in Queen? Someone out there must know.

Now, Wikipedia says that the songs concerned were "Good Company" and "Bring Back That Leroy Brown", but were there any others? Given the sheer level of Queen knowledge that some of you posess, I refuse to believe that you don't know the answer.

Tech support request

Aaargh.

My girlfriend's laptop's died. It's an EiSystems model 4413, a shade over two years old, running WinXP. It's been increasingly flaky of late: it gets very hot, the battery life is measured in seconds, and the backlight's very angle-sensitive. Today, it exhibited the following symptoms:

- After being on for four or five hours, it BSODed (the last thing that had been done was to turn Spider off, a few seconds previously). The BSOD was of the "Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer" variety. We don't know the exact error message: my flatmate (the only one around at the time) thinks it contained the word "kernel" - possibly STOP 0x0000007F (UNEXPECTED_KERNEL_MODE_TRAP)? Needless to say, we don't have any of the other information shown.
- It didn't turn itself off, so he held down the "Off" switch for a few seconds until it did. Then he turned it back on again.
- It came back on for a few seconds, then turned itself off without going through the boot process.
- He left it to cool down for a quarter of an hour, then turned it back on again. It booted successfully, then BSODed again (same message) about ten seconds after Windows came up. The fan stayed on for about a quarter of an hour, in spite of the black screen. The on/off switch had no effect.
- He left it to cool down again, and tried to switch it on. Nothing happened. The "machine plugged in" LED was blank, regardless of the plugged-inness of the machine. The machine was totally unresponsive. At this point he called me.
- We left it for another hour or so, then tried again. Nothing. Currently it's unplugged.

So, where do I go from here? What do I do to diagnose/fix the problem? Any ideas?